AWFL is a new acronym for Affluent White Female Liberals or, as I think of it, Angry White Female Leftists. These are the women who have become the hysterically screaming front lines of every leftist protest, the passionate devotees of Kamala Harris, and the growing cohort of angry, man-hating, hard-left cat ladies. Matt Walsh contends that many are the product of Big Pharma, specifically, the Pill. I think he’s right.
In the 1980s, I came across a fascinating book called Napoleon's Glands and Other Ventures in Biohistory by the late Arno Karlen. (Sadly, now out of print, so I cherish my yellowed copy.) As the title suggests, the book examines how diseases have affected history, everything from how Napoleon’s failing health affected the outcome at Waterloo to how Goya’s probable STD changed his painting style.
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However, the chapter that resonated most with me was the one entitled “The Upright, The Erotic,” in which Karno discussed the Pill’s effect on humanity—specifically, the relationship between the sexes and the future of the human race. What he pointed out is that the Pill had been put into mass production without ever testing how changing women’s hormones would change their relationship with men. He also spoke about the rise in psychotropic drugs and the fact that no one was questioning what they were doing to human functioning. In 1984, Karno prophetically saw this as a problem.
For me, the point about the Pill really resonated because it almost killed me and a friend. My friend got a massive blood clot in her leg, while I threw up non-stop for a year, going down to 85 pounds, and also suffered from extreme panic attacks, a problem I’d never had before and never had once I went off the Pill. It took a year of misdiagnoses before a doctor said, “Throw the Pill out!” and another five years before I fully recovered physically.
Since then, I’ve kept an eye on the Pill. One of the things I’ve noticed is the rise of baby-faced movie stars. In the old days, men in Hollywood movies looked manly. However, as the Pill became more prevalent, we saw the rise of the baby-faced man, everyone from chipmunk cheek Brad Pitt to the perpetually downy Ryan Reynolds and Jake Gyllenhaal. That was consistent with the fact that women on the Pill prefer less masculine men, which makes sense. Given that the Pill mimics pregnancy, women will be drawn to baby faces.
But if the Pill changes perceptions, it’s also going to change behaviors. And this is where Matt Walsh comes in. He and his team did a deep dive into recent studies about the Pill’s effects on women’s emotional responses, and they align point by point with the rise of the AWFL:
[A] new study from researchers at Rice University in Texas, published in the journal “Hormones and Behavior,” has been getting so much attention. In short, the researchers found that hormonal contraceptives affect “emotional processing and memory.”
[snip]
The end result, according to Rice, is that:
Women on hormonal contraceptives showed stronger emotional reactions compared to naturally cycling women. When they used strategies like distancing or reinterpretation, they remembered fewer details of negative events, though their general memory remained intact. In other words, they could recall the overall event but not all of the specifics.
While the researchers excitedly said the Pill could be used to reduce women’s traumatic memories, Walsh asked different questions:
What happens when millions of women become more forgetful and more emotional at the same time? Do these women vote differently? Are their relationships more unstable as a result?
That’s not all that Walsh dug up about the Pill’s bizarre effects on women:
In 2023, for example, researchers in Montreal, writing for the journal “Frontiers in Endocrinology,” discovered evidence that hormonal contraceptives shrink a portion of the prefrontal cortex — specifically, the portion of the prefrontal cortex that’s involved in controlling emotions, maintaining self-control, making decisions and handling fear.
In other words, it’s likely that the Pill turns women into screaming, cowering hysterics. At this moment, you, Walsh, and I are all thinking the same thing:
What happens when we break the “fear response” in the brains of millions of women? If we did something like that, could it explain, perhaps, why so many American women are petrified of climate change, the plight of criminal illegal aliens, the prospect of losing the right to kill their children, and the fate of a tiny country in Eastern Europe that they can’t even locate on a map? Could it explain why, if only women could vote, then Kamala Harris would’ve won all 50 states? Could there be a connection there?
There’s also the fact that when men are around pregnant women, their testosterone drops. The CDC says that 14% of women aged 15-49 are on the Pill, with 20% of women in the 15-29 age cohort accounting for much of that number. That’s a lot of testosterone-lowering hormones floating through the air, especially among younger men. Does that help explain why, across the West, men’s sperm counts are dropping dramatically? Is this the answer to the rise of the soy boy? Does it even help explain exploding male “transgender” identification?
Arno Karlen was right: The Pill was a bomb dropped in the West. We knew instantly that it changed sexual mores, breaking apart family stability, but its effects may well have been much more deleterious than anyone ever imagined. It’s time to push back against the Pill in whatever ways we can, because it is one more thing destroying the West and leaving us vulnerable both to our geopolitical enemies and to the AWFLs’ own worst instincts.
By the way, if you prefer listening to reading, here’s Walsh’s monologue: